2009.11.04: Jesse Lonergan's time teaching English in Turkmenistan became the graphic novel "Joe and Azat," a fictional tale based on Lonergan's year and a half assignment from September 2005 to February 2007

Jesse Lonergan's time teaching English in Turkmenistan became the graphic novel "Joe and Azat," a fictional tale based on Lonergan's year and a half assignment from September 2005 to February 2007

Lonergan, whose parents met and were wed in the Peace Corps, had resisted serving given his upbringing, but soon desired to spend time abroad. His time teaching English in Turkmenistan became the graphic novel "Joe and Azat," a fictional tale based on Lonergan's year and a half assignment from September 2005 to February 2007. The story follows the unlikely friendship of an American and a Turkmen as they trade cultural gaffes and tolerate life in a totalitarian regime. (Azat's brother, for example, claims that he is the Turkmen version of Chuck Norris.)

When Jesse Lonergan got his assignment for the Peace Corps to Turkmenistan, he quickly started researching the post-Soviet satellite state. "I'd heard of it before, and I could find it on a map, but that's about it," he jokes.

Lonergan, whose parents met and were wed in the Peace Corps, had resisted serving given his upbringing, but soon desired to spend time abroad. His time teaching English in Turkmenistan became the graphic novel "Joe and Azat," a fictional tale based on Lonergan's year and a half assignment from September 2005 to February 2007.

The story follows the unlikely friendship of an American and a Turkmen as they trade cultural gaffes and tolerate life in a totalitarian regime. (Azat's brother, for example, claims that he is the Turkmen version of Chuck Norris.)

Cartoonists have long tackled travel writing in a variety of ways. Canadian Guy Delisle wrote about his time in Burma, Pyongyang, and Shenzhen with humor, tracking his various travails in each country he visited with an outsider's eye while attempting to glean something deeper about the places he occupied. Joe Sacco's work on Palestine and Israel, conversely, has a stronger moral tone with the artist injecting his own opinions into his work. For Lonergan, who was inspired by the short stories of W. Somerset Maugham, he hoped to inject some humanity into a country that's known mostly for its eccentric dictator.

"You only read about the crazy politics and it doesn't give a sense of reality. I wanted to focus on what life was like for people there rather than the dictator who names January after himself," says Lonergan. This is a real place and that can be lost in the stories I read."

Of course, not everything Lonergan experienced made its way into the book. "I hated the food," he says. "But that doesn't need to be commented on."

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Story Source: Wall Street Journal

This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Turkmenistan; Comics

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